Warning: This tool or project is no longer maintained and kept available only for archival purposes. Since GoodRelations and schema.org have evolved significantly in the past years, the current status available on this page is unlikely to function as expected. We take no responsibility for any damage caused by the use of this outdated work, to the extent legally possible.

Due to a lack of resources, we are unable to provide support for this project outside of consulting projects or sponsored research. Please contact us if you can contribute resources to update and enhance these resources.

GoodRelations Annotator and GoodRelations Snippet Generator:
The easy way to advertise your business on the Web of Linked Data.

These two free tools, provided by the group of Prof. Hepp at the Universität der Bundeswehr in Munich, Germany will return a few lines of extra HTML markup that you can copy and paste into your main Web page. The GoodRelations Annotator offers more options, but also requires a bit more data from your side. The GoodRelations Snippet Generator is the simplest way to add GoodRelations to your Web pages.

GoodRelations is a standardized vocabulary for product, price, and company data that can (1) be embedded into existing static and dynamic Web pages and that (2) can be processed by other computers. This increases the visibility of your products and services in the latest generation of search engines, recommender systems, and other novel applications.

Click here to start the GoodRelations Annotator tool

Click here to start the GoodRelations Snippet Generator

What is GoodRelations?

GoodRelations is a language that can be used to describe very precisely what your business is offering. Some people call GoodRelations a "data dictionary", others prefer "schema" or "ontology". The name, however, is not important. Important is that you can use GoodRelations to create a small data package that describes your products and their features and prices, your stores and opening hours, payment options and the like.

You simply paste this data package into your Web page using W3C's RDFa format. That's all!

Click here for a Webcast on E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data
(15 minutes - more than 8,000 viewers to date)

Why should I care?

If you add GoodRelations to your Web pages, you increase the visibility of your offers in the latest generation of search engines and recommender systems.

Traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tries to put you on top of all search results, but quite clearly, that can work only for one company. GoodRelations puts you on top of Web visibility for people who are looking for exactly your products or services.

In other words: Your particular value proposition will become visible for people with matching needs and preferences.

How can I use it?

Simply describe your company and products using the free GoodRelations Snippet Generator tool. It will return a few lines of extra HTML markup that you can copy and paste into your main Web page. Or, use one of the many freely available GoodRelations extensions for your Web shop or CMS software.

If you are a developer, you can also take one of the markup examples from the GoodRelations Cookbook.

Features

  • One vocabulary for many targets: GoodRelations markup will be honored by both traditional search engines (Yahoo, partly Google) and novel linked data / Semantic Web applications.
  • Multi-syntax: GoodRelations data can be published as RDFa in HTML, Microdata, RDF/XML, Turtle, dataRSS, and N3 (soon also OData and GData)
  • Minimal impact on page size and loading times (only ca. 1500 bytes of additional markup)
  • Company and store information, including opening hours
  • Detailed pricing, including list prices, quantity discounts, and price ranges
  • Payment and delivery options and individual fees
  • Product models ("datasheets"), product variants, consumables, and spare parts
  • Variable level of detail: Simple cases are simple, complex scenarios are fully supported.
  • Suited for B2C & B2B scenarios
  • Suited for any industry, from consumer electronics to industrial parts and components or services
  • Supports wishlists and tendering
  • Can be combined with Facebook's Open Graph protocol
  • ... and a lot more!

Stay Tuned

Please join the GoodRelations mailing list:

Also, please watch the hashtag #goodrelations on twitter.

This will keep you informed about news and updates on the GoodRelations ontology project and related activities.

License

The GoodRelations ontology is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work; to remix/adapt the work (e.g. to import the ontology and create specializations of its elements), as long as you attribute the work, e.g. by stating "This work is based on the GoodRelations ontology, developed by Martin Hepp" and linking back to http://purl.org/goodrelations/.

Contact

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Martin Hepp
E-Business and Web Science Research Group, Chair of General Management and E-Business
Universität der Bundeswehr München
Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39
D-85579 Neubiberg, Germany

Phone: +49 89 6004-4217
eMail: mhepp(at)computer.org (preferred mode of communication)
Web: http://www.heppnetz.de
Web: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/

Publications

Hepp, Martin: GoodRelations: An Ontology for Describing Products and Services Offers on the Web, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW2008), Acitrezza, Italy, September 29 - October 3, 2008, Springer LNCS, Vol 5268, pp. 332-347.

Acknowledgements

The work on the GoodRelations ontology has been partly supported by the Austrian BMVIT/FFG under the FIT-IT Semantic Systems project myOntology (grant no. 812515/9284), by a Young Researcher's Grant (Nachwuchsförderung 2005-2006) from the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, and by the European Commission under the project SUPER (FP6-026850).